Anna Karenina eBook

Now it was clear to him that he could only live by
virtue of the beliefs in which he had been brought
up.

“What should I have been, and how should I have
spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if
I had not known that I must live for God and not for
my own desires? I should have robbed and lied
and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness
of my life would have existed for me.”
And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could
not conceive the brutal creature he would have been
himself, if he had not known what he was living for.

“I looked for an answer to my question.
And thought could not give an answer to my question—­it
is incommensurable with my question. The answer
has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge
of what is right and what is wrong. And that
knowledge I did not arrive at in any way, it was given
to me as to all men, given, because I could
not have got it from anywhere.

“Where could I have got it? By reason
could I have arrived at knowing that I must love my
neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that
in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they
told me what was already in my soul. But who
discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered
the struggle for existence, and the law that requires
us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our
desires. That is the deduction of reason.
But loving one’s neighbor reason could never
discover, because it’s irrational.”

Chapter 13

And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed
between Dolly and her children. The children,
left to themselves, had begun cooking raspberries
over the candles and squirting milk into each other’s
mouths with a syringe. Their mother, catching
them at these pranks, began reminding them in Levin’s
presence of the trouble their mischief gave to the
grown-up people, and that this trouble was all for
their sake, and that if they smashed the cups they
would have nothing to drink their tea out of, and that
if they wasted the milk, they would have nothing to
eat, and die of hunger.

And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity
with which the children heard what their mother said
to them. They were simply annoyed that their
amusing play had been interrupted, and did not believe
a word of what their mother was saying. They
could not believe it indeed, for they could not take
in the immensity of all they habitually enjoyed, and
so could not conceive that what they were destroying
was the very thing they lived by.

“That all comes of itself,” they thought,
“and there’s nothing interesting or important
about it because it has always been so, and always
will be so. And it’s all always the same.
We’ve no need to think about that, it’s
all ready. But we want to invent something of
our own, and new. So we thought of putting raspberries
in a cup, and cooking them over a candle, and squirting
milk straight into each other’s mouths.
That’s fun, and something new, and not a bit
worse than drinking out of cups.”